“Quantification of Fossil Data”

February 10 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PST

“Quantification of Fossil Data” and an update on the fossil identification app

ABSTRACT:

It has been over 75 years, since Charles Butts published his famous and classic monograph on the fossils of the Appalachian mountains in 1941. Recently, I have been in the process of updating the taxonomy of his work and I am in the process of developing an app to help paleontologists identify fossils. This talk will present the results of my work which has revealed interesting evolutionary patterns in fossil organisms. At the request of Virginia Tech University and James Madison University, I have added traditional morphological filters to the database of the app, which has allowed me to increase the number of fossils the app can identify and the accuracy of the identifications. The app is currently being used by curators at the Virginia Museum of Natural History to identify their unknown fossil specimens.